Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Monday voted that 2020 elections ballots in Wisconsin can only be counted if received by Election Day.
Kavanaugh issued his own concurring opinion, where he suggested that state courts should be barred from protecting voting rights.
Kavanaugh also made a mistake of fact.
Sam Levine, a voting rights reporter for the Guardian, noted Kavanaugh was inaccurate in his concurring opinion.
“Other states, such as Vermont, by contrast, have decided not to make changes to their ordinary election rules,” Kavanaugh claimed.
That is not correct, on July 2nd the legislative bill S.348became law in Vermont. The bill was titled, “An act relating to temporary elections procedures in the year 2020.”
The good-government group VPIRG explained the importance of the bill.
“On Friday, Governor Phil Scott allowed S.348 to become law without his signature. This law grants full authority to the Secretary of State to mail all registered voters a ballot for this year’s General Election in November. This law finally makes it possible for Vermont to move forward with a vote-by-mail system, which is the safest way for citizens to cast their ballot during the pandemic,” VPIRG explained.
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
Brett Kavanaugh Caught Lying in SCOTUS Opinion Against Voting Access
Amy Coney Barrett's First Decision As a Justice Was a Wrong One
Barrett didn't have to participate in a prime-time political spectacle at the White House, just eight days before Election Day. But she did.
Oct. 27, 2020, 8:00 AM EDT
By Steve Benen
snip//
Last night, the former reality-show personality turned the dial to 11, hosting a prime-time spectacle at the White House. It was, for all intents and purposes, a campaign celebration, held for the cameras, just eight days before Election Day.
The merriment had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer: Barrett stood in the spotlight, on a White House balcony in front of the presidential seal, alongside Trump who beamed with pride before an applauding audience, which included Republican senators who spent last week pretending they have no idea how the far-right ideologue will rule on cases of lasting import.
Barrett was then ceremonially sworn in by Justice Clarence Thomas -- arguably the high court's most reactionary conservative -- as if to drive home the point that the right had taken over the judiciary.
Barrett had a choice. She does not serve at the pleasure of the president. The Supreme Court's newest member could've told the White House, "No, I'm not comfortable with this. I'm not a trophy to be shown off during a re-election campaign." On the show last night, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) described the event as "the latest episode of the Trump reality-TV show, 'Re-Election Theater.'"
And therein lies the point: Barrett's first decision as a confirmed Supreme Court justice was to agree to participate in this political spectacle. She knew about the electoral context; she knew this prime-time program would give the appearance of a political victory party; and she chose to do this anyway.
CNN's Jake Tapper heard from a Republican consultant last night who said in reference to the White House show, "If I'm [Amy Coney Barrett], I don't go to this." The consultant added that it "looks bad."
Her apparent indifference to the damage all of this does to her credibility and the legitimacy of her institution speaks volumes about Barrett and the indefensible process that concluded with such a brazenly political coda.
Sunday, October 25, 2020
Trump's campaign is not returning donations from white supremacist donors
but he's the least racist person ever!!!
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/white-supremacist-donors-trump-campaign-2020_n_5f9336c7c5b6494ba13be8d8?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004
President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign has repeatedly accepted donations from well-known white supremacists, extremists and bigots, Federal Election Commission records show.
Among the far-right figures who have given money to Trump’s reelection bid are a neo-Nazi pastor in Louisiana, a wealthy Florida businessman who called former President Barack Obama the N-word, and a neo-fascist activist recently arrested for opening fire on Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Portland, Oregon.
The Trump campaign, which did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on this story, has been aware of at least some of the white supremacists’ donations, past media reports show. But it has declined to reject or return their money ― even though it is common practice for political campaigns to voluntarily forfeit donations from extremists. In 2015, for example, the Republican presidential campaigns of Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz returned thousands of dollars in contributions from the leader of a white supremacist group.
The extremists’ donations to Trump’s campaign can be seen in official FEC filings. The contributions were spotted and compiled into a dossier by American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic super PAC that conducts opposition research to boost the campaign of Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden. HuffPost independently verified the records of the contributions.
Saturday, October 24, 2020
Trump Is Purposefully Spreading a Deadly Virus
Trump’s campaign made stops nationwide. Coronavirus cases surged in his wake in at least five places.
As President Donald Trump jetted across the country holding campaign rallies during the past two months, he didn’t just defy state orders and federal health guidelines. He left a trail of coronavirus outbreaks in his wake. The president has participated in nearly three dozen rallies since mid-August, all but two at airport hangars. A USA TODAY analysis shows COVID-19 cases grew at a faster rate than before after at least five of those rallies in the following counties: Blue Earth, Minnesota; Lackawanna, Pennsylvania; Marathon, Wisconsin; Dauphin, Pennsylvania; and Beltrami, Minnesota.
Thursday, October 15, 2020
The Barrett Nomination Shows the GOP Are Pushing for a Christian Theocracy
Let me assure you. As a survivor and scholarof authoritarianism, the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation is much, much worse than you probably think, and that’s alreadyif you think it’s pretty bad. Why do I say that? The big picture is this: America has a choice before it. Either it begins to become a modern society, like Europe and Canada — it’s half a centurybehind them. Or it plunges into hardcore implosion, like Russia and Iran — becoming a true failed state.
All this at the most crucial juncture, by the way, in human history, when the fate of civilisation will be decided— but I digress.
The Republicans, who are ramming her through the confirmation process, breaking every norm and precedent, have effectively two arguments. Each is more absurd than the last.
The first is that she is a “brilliant legal mind.” The second is that she’s not the fanatic she appears to be. Think about that — it’s literally asking you not to believe what’s in front of your face.
Is she a brilliant legal mind? It’s easy enough to observe that America doesn’t really have brilliant minds at that level anymore, which is why it’s a collapsing society. It has minds ranging from mediocre — Ezra, Jake, Chris — to thoughtless, like all those alt-right “intellectuals” like Bannon, who was once hailed as Nietzsche in cargo pants. ACB is on the poorer half of that spectrum. Maybe you think that’s unkind, so let me prove it.
A truly brilliant legal mind would observe something like the following. America is a society in the latter stages of collapse. The average American has become a poor person, dying in $60,000 of debt, unable to raise a small amountfor emergencies, struggling to pay the bills. As a result, happiness, trust, meaning, and social bonds have all come undone. That despair, in turn, fuelled a vicious circleof authoritarianism.
Where didn’t all this happen? Europe and Canada.Why not? Precisely because their jurisprudence has created a vastly different set of societies — truly modern ones, where living standards are vastly higher. So why did America collapse, while Europe and Canada prospered?
It’s a little known fact that American jurisprudence is effectively failed American economics in disguise. No, not Mom and Pop shops. The law of the artificial lowest price. The thinking goes that the lowest price is always the best — it “maximizes consumer welfare.” Who can provide the lowest price? The biggest corporations. That is why every industry in America is now what economists call “highly concentrated,” meaning dominated by a tiny number of monopolies, from banking to finance to real estate to healthcare.
Now, a good legal mind — not even a brilliant one — would ask: was that theory true?Did the law of the lowest price by way of gigantic monopolies really lead to higher living standards? The answer is: obviously not. Americans have the lowest living standardsin the rich world, approaching those of much poorer countries. They live vastly shorter, poorer, dumber, meaner, and more desperate lives than Canadians and Europeans.
A good legal mind would conclude that something went badly, badly wrong with the grand American theories of the lowest price.
ACB seems to be a staunch supporter of all the above. She’s never asked the question once: why did America collapse, while Europe and Canada prospered? Why not?
The answer to that question reveals what she really is. A fundamentalist. ACB subscribes to a theory that’s called in America “originalism.”It means something like: no deviation from America’s founding documents should ever be possible. The constitution should be interpreted as it is, in the way it would have been intended when it was written.
In simpler language, we’d call all that fundamentalism.Because it prevents a mind like ACB’s from asking the question above, and answering it properly. If you assume the answer to every social question is always: go back to America’s founding documents!! What kind of progress can you really make? The answer is none. And in that literal and real sense, “originalism” is a euphemism for fundamentalism.
A better mind would observe that Canada and Europe prospered because they have cutting-edgeconstitutions.In them, things like healthcare, retirement, education, income, and so on, are all guaranteed as basic rights. Therefore, there have to be social-scale institutions to provide them. America’s constitution, by contrast, is two and a half centuries old. It is not fit for the 21st century, because it recognises none of the things we now consider basics as rights. Hence, Americans have to battle one another for them, in a never-ending, bitter, bruising contest for the basics, whether income or healthcare. That is what it means to be a collapsed society.
But if all you assumeis “originalism,” that America’s founding ideas are flawless, the answer to every possible question, then you can never understand any of the above. You cannot engage with the modern world at all.
America’s founding documents are deeply inadequate to build a modern society upon precisely because they were meant for a slave state.Americans may not want to hear that, but it’s true. And that brings me to the second half of ACB’s fundamentalism, the second argument Republicans make for her. “She’s not the fanatic she appears to be!” now that we’ve dismantled the foolish notion that she’s some kind of American Aristotle.
Monday, October 12, 2020
Last Chance for American Democracy
In normal times, we might regard any vote as ethical. To participate in an election is to dignify oneself as a citizen with a voice, and to express with others the interests and values that guide the future of our land. But these are not normal times. This is clear from the perspective of the candidates. During a normal campaign, both candidates take for granted that they will walk free after the election. One will be in the Oval Office; the other will go home.
This year is different. One candidate, Donald Trump, knows that, should he not remain in power, he will descend into poverty, go to prison, or both. He can hold the ongoing criminal investigations at bay so long as he is president, but not thereafter. Trump owes hundreds of millions of dollars to his creditors and has no visible means to pay them back. As president he can expect his creditors to wait; as a private citizen he cannot.
If someone can maintain wealth and freedom only by holding onto power, that person will fight to hold onto power. Behind the ideologies and the propaganda, this is the core history of tyranny: government becomes the bodyguard of a gangster. Modern authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin have much to say about why they must remain in power, but the real issue is that they wish to die wealthy and in their own beds rather than poor and in prison. In authoritarian countries, the anxiety of the tyrant can be allayed by a promise not to prosecute the leader and his family, and to leave their bank accounts in peace.
Because the rule of law still (more or less) prevails in the United States, no one can offer Trump such a deal. He is therefore in a fight for his life; from his point of view, he needs to spend the rest of it in the White House. His predicament might not be obvious to Americans, but people in authoritarian countries see it right away.
It is also unusual, in an American presidential campaign, for one of the candidates to admit defeat. Trump has a fine political mind, and he can read polls and the national mood as well as anyone. For months now, he has been signaling that he cannot beat Joe Biden in an election. When he tried to summon the armed forces to aid him in June, it was the gesture of a man who needed unusual forms of help. When he tweeted in July that elections should be delayed, he revealed that he did not think he could win them. Undermining the United States Postal Service, asking his supporters to vote twice, and saying that he will not accept the results: all of these are ways of saying that he expects to lose. His campaign has ignored swing voters, and the Republican National Convention made no attempt to reach the undecided.
In the first presidential debate, Trump tried, as he has done for months, to delegitimize the election as such. The plan is not to win the popular (or even the electoral) vote, but rather to stay in power in some other way. If we take Trump at his word and begin from the premise that he cannot win the election, then his actions make sense. The plan is not to win the popular (or even the electoral) vote, but rather to stay in power in some other way.
We don’t even really have to guess about this, since Trump has spelled it out himself: he will declare victory regardless of what happens, expect state governments to act contrary to vote counts, claim fraud from postal ballots, court chaos from white nationalists (and perhaps the Department of Homeland Security), and expect the Supreme Court to install him. In general, the idea behind these scenarios is to create as much chaos as possible, and then fall back upon personal ruthlessness and an artificial state of emergency to stay in power.
If Trump creates a constitutional crisis while his supporters commit acts of violence, the Supreme Court might be intimidated. In this transition from democracy to authoritarianism, otherwise known as a coup d’état, the actual number of people who vote for Trump matters less than it would in an ordinary election. In this scenario, it matters more how angry they are, and how willing some of them are to endorse extraordinary actions by Trump, or to take such actions themselves. Since he is treating election day as the occasion for a coup, Trump has good reason not to soften his message to reach more voters. In doing so he would risk losing some of the emotion he needs when he tries to stay in power by non-democratic means. He only has to stay within about ten points of Joe Biden to avoid the demoralization that arises when even core supporters realize they have been deceived by their leader and overwhelmed by their fellow citizens at the polls. It is unusual for a plan for a coup d’état to be broadcast so clearly.
Yet there is a political logic here, one with deep moral implications. By telling Americans in advance that he intends to stay in power regardless of the vote count, Trump is implicating his supporters in the action as it unfolds. He is giving them notice that they are siding with someone who intends to work hard to see that votes are not counted. He is giving them to understand that they are participants in the unravelling of American democracy. They might not want to face this reality squarely, which would be a normal reaction. This is a lesson of modern tyranny: authoritarianism need not be a conscious project of those embraced by it. They need only sleepwalk through the roles assigned to them. When democracy lies in the dust, they will find rationalizations for what they have done, and will support the authoritarian regime that follows, because they are already involved. No argument from emotions or interests can stop that process. The degradation is ethical, and so the question is about ethics.
What, then, is the moral meaning of a vote for Donald Trump on November 3? To vote for Trump is to traduce the meaning of voting, which is a normal part of the transition to authoritarianism. Since the collective effect of votes for Trump is to create background plausibility for a coup, each vote for Trump is participation in a plot to end the American republic. It is to vote for a future in which voting does not matter. It is a choice by Americans to no longer make choices as Americans. It transforms individuals with interests and values into elements of a spectacle that legitimates an authoritarian regime change.
If Trump stays in power, elections will continue to take place, but they will be meaningless. Soon we will not bother to speak of fraud, because voting will be a joke. In that dark scenario, the joke is on the Trump voter, since a vote for Trump is a vote for spiritual self-annihilation. If Trump stays in power in 2021, a Trump voter will enjoy the quick hit of “winning,” a spasm of joy that distracts from a profound moral loss. It is no victory to vote for never voting again, to beg for voicelessness. It is submission.
Joe Biden is not a perfect candidate, but he is a candidate who supports democracy: the American dignity of representing oneself, and the American aspiration to see our values and interests prevail in our government. If our democracy dies, a Biden voter will be able to say to herself that she did the right thing, did what was possible, did not give in. A Biden voter can speak proudly about America’s past as a democracy, will preserve the moral resources to resist authoritarianism, and might at some later point contribute to a resurrection of the republic.
In a moral sense, a Trump voter has much more to lose than a Biden voter, since the stakes in November are not only about what the candidates would do in office, but about who we will be afterward as individuals. The Trump voter is risking something precious: his or her standing as an American to be counted, as a person to be reckoned with. To vote for Trump is to cast away that standing; it is to become, as the president likes to say, a “sucker” and a “loser.” To vote for Trump is to give away something that rightly belongs to others, their future in a democracy, and to lose something of yourself that you can never recover, the dignity of a citizen of our republic.
Trump is indeed a traitor and murderer, a filthy traitor and a greedy ass bribe-taking criminal.
Saturday, October 3, 2020
The President Is Our Mass Murderer
Sometimes, oh, my sweet, weary people of Donald Trump's America, it feels like we're sailing in skiffs on a sea of shit and some of us believe we can get across the shit sea to shore and some of us believe that we're gonna sink but we all know we're damned to keep sailing as wave after wave of shit keeps hitting us, and every time we dare to hope that we've seen the worst shit wave, that perhaps we'll get a break and just sail as smoothly as possible through a shit sea, a fucking massive turd wave in a shit storm appears on the horizon and we've gotta batten down the hatches and ride this one out, even though we know that in the best possible circumstances, we'll get over or through but still coated in shit.
What does it change that we now have Trump on audio telling reporter Bob Woodward that he knew back in early February that COVID-19 was airborne and dangerous, far worse, in his own words, than a "strenuous flu"? What does it change that we now can hear Trump say that he downplayed the virus to the public on purpose? In some ways, obviously, it changes nothing. It doesn't bring back the dead. It doesn't rebuild the lives shattered by the shutdown economy. It doesn't really make us understand Trump any more than we already did. We know that he is the motherfuckingest motherfucker anyone has ever met. We know that he was deliberately avoiding action on coronavirus until the mounting death toll and hospitalizations forced him to do something.
But what has changed today is that we know without a doubt that Trump wasn't just spitballing and gambling that the virus wouldn't be bad, despite experts outside of the federal government telling us it would be. He knew. He fucking knew. He knew it and could articulate how dangerous the situation was going to get. And he chose to pretend otherwise and lie to the nation, forcing others to lie, too. After telling Woodward it was worse than the flu, he tweeted the exact opposite, mocking the idea that it's worse than the flu. After telling Woodward that "young people" are susceptible to it, he said that children are "almost immune" to the virus. And no matter how many ways Trump and his ass remoras attempt to spin this as nobly trying not to panic people, there's a fucking world of difference between yelling, "Fire" in a crowded theatre and telling everyone to just sit still while the fire burns out. This is not fine.
Every single person who knew should have spoken. They should have given Trump the finger and told us, including Bob fucking Woodward. Because how the fuck do we trust anything now? Most of us didn't trust Trump, but we thought we could look at others, look at the CDC or Anthony Fauci and find the truth. But they all decided to stay silent, out of either blind or craven loyalty to Trump or the misguided hope they could mitigate the damage by staying quiet, the pathetic error that so many tainted public servants have made.
And now we're supposed to listen when this lying son of a bitch whose face looks like a one-nut pig scrotum and who speaks in barks like a brain-damaged beagle bitch tells us to get an untested vaccine? Fuck off all the way to Moscow.
This is personal, too. I remember wondering all through February and into March whether or not I should wear a mask. I was reading articlesabout whether or not masks are effective, with many telling us not to worry about it, that the slim supply of masks had to go to health care workers. It gnawed at me until I finally decided, "Fuck it, I'm wearing one" about a week before the CDC changed course and said we should. The thing is that by that point I already had gotten COVID. I didn't get sick until a few days after I started mask-wearing, which means I was doing my part then. As I've said before, I had very mild symptoms, just a low-grade fever, some fatigue, and a bit of a cough. Sure, it could have been far worse, and I'm pissed at Trump about getting sick. But most of the time, you have the goddamn virus before your symptoms show up. I should have been wearing a mask all along. I don't fucking know who I might have spread it to. And that bullshit weighs on me, and that's on Trump and everyone who stayed quiet.
We knew Trump was busily corrupting every part of the government he could get his shit-stained fingers on. We knew that he was too fucking lazy to really take the action that he needed to take, as simple as that may have been. We knew that we needed to amp up production of masks and gloves and fucking tests. We knew that it was goddamn weird that it didn't happen. We knew that the only thing that matters to Trump is re-election, something that Fauci is quoted as saying in Woodward's book. Fuck, we knew that Trump was actually, actively evil and not just stupidly so. The cockscab wants violence in the streets (which is something that makes his claim of trying to prevent panic utterly laughable).
I'm not really shocked by what we've learned. I'm frankly only shocked that Trump went on the record with it. Which means that he thinks he was right to lie to Americans. He said that today, like he's some fuckin' hero for shutting down the information we needed to save our fucking lives. And by so willingly talking to Woodward, it also means that, even though he should be forced out of office and arrested, Trump believes he will suffer no consequences for his evil. And every single time, that has been proven correct. Even now, when he's killed people in the middle of every avenue, the president as our mass murderer. And that, dear Americans, is something we haven't seen in a long damn time.
Sometimes it feels like the sails on our skiffs are broken, and so we are just drifting on the shit sea, buffeted by the waves, wondering if we'll float to land before we die of exposure.
How This Fascist Asshole POTUS Wants to "Win" "Re-Election"
--Having his white supremacist asshole supporters intimidate Democratic voters at the polls
-- Slow down the mail service and interfere with mail balloting
-- challenging the validity of mail-in ballots in swing states in the courts
-- winning the case in his rigged Supreme Court
--as a fall-back throwing the electoral college into disarray and winning the election by bizarre, sleazy and extraordinary means.
One way or another, he wants to disenfranchise millions of voters and destroy our democracy. It's sick and he's one sick fuckface.
Trump Is a National Security Threat And Trump Supporting Republicans Have Shit the Bed on National Security
Trump's Very Bad, No Good, Horrible, Catastrophic Week
Second, his debate performance with Joe Biden was a massive trainwreck, shitshow, dumpster fire. It showed off what a complete sociopath this president is.
Then he got the Coronavirus because he's a fucking dumbass and got sick enough to be taken to Walter Reed Army Hospital.
For a president who bathes in bad news, this was rough week even for him.
